Amazon 2016 Wrap Up

Location: Avon Park, FL

A big thank you to Carl for his comment on yesterday’s post reminding me that I never did a final Amazon post with all the final numbers for the year.

As I’ve already mentioned, this was a very different year. We already knew before we started that we weren’t going to make as much as usual since we weren’t starting until the last week of September. This was our fourth season and every previous year we started around the 25th of August. We had a really good reason for starting later though, since Harry’s son was married on the 16th of September. We also enjoyed several days at my sister’s house in NY, and got to see our niece and nephew play some high school soccer games. There were actually people who started at Amazon the beginning of August so there was two more months of available work if we had wanted to take advantage of that. (We did briefly consider starting early and just going to NY for the wedding, but we would have had to just take three or four days off, drive straight to the wedding and back. We just wanted to be more present for the event than just have it be stuck in the middle of a work week.)

The other huge difference was the non-peak that we ended up having in December. Knowing that we were going to make so much less, we went into peak planning to work as much OT as we could. I was going to do the 60 hour weeks and Harry planned to do 55s. When they had what they call their “all hands meeting” where planned numbers for peak are presented, they were expecting the usual – lots of overtime. But right at the beginning on Black Friday, we noticed that things were different, when they offered VTO (voluntary time off) to a few shifts that afternoon. And it continued the following week, when we went in for the first mandatory overtime day, and they offered VTO again. Then after that, they started cancelling the mandatory days and just offering a few spots of overtime using their online system that went very quickly. 

Anyway, so because of that we had

• one 28 hour week
• five 40 hour weeks
• two 35 hour weeks – I had an ear infection and ended up at urgent care one week and then the ER the following week.
• four 50 hour weeks for me – Harry had three 50 and one 45 since he worked a half day OT and then our second OT day that week was cancelled
• last week of the season was 30 hours

I also had a fabulous year for winning gift cards, as I won a $50 Visa card AND $50 in $5 cards to various stores. We have enough $5 cards to Dairy Queen to last the whole year! Harry won $10 in gift cards. So we couldn’t complain about that.

We ended up working in the range of about 530 hours each so that was the general amount of our bonus, receiving $1/hour for each hour worked.

Our total income ended up being $7013.46 for me this year vs. $9999.70 last year. Harry made $7151.76 vs. $9977.16 last year.

We have already applied for next season, and assuming that they continue to start groups early, we plan to start in early August. We’ll be sick of it by December, but our bank account will be happy!